When speaking of healthcare, patient safety and quality care are essential. As the largest healthcare provider, nurses have a significant share in this mission. According to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), almost one million individuals suffer each year in America due to medical errors, many leading to death. This paper will focus on a significant safety quality problem in healthcare and how nurses play a role in solving it.
One of the crucial and severe threats to patient safety in a healthcare setting is making identification errors. Such misidentification may lead to severe outcomes, breach of trusting relationships, a rift in professional reputation, legal ramifications that disrupt operations, and healthcare provider trauma, escalating costs while causing accreditation complications (Popescu et al., 2022). Errors in patient identification were selected because they not only risk the safety of patients but also slowly undermine the entire healthcare system. These errors undermine the effectiveness of health outcomes, increasing the chances of wrong treatments and operations and destroying patients’ confidence in those who provide healthcare. These errors probably have a perceived ripple effect on operational effectiveness, regulatory compliance, and professional image in a healthcare facility. Moreover, such errors contribute to a system-level weakness that underlines the importance of accurate and faultless identification protocols to maintain patients’ safety and ensure healthcare consistency.
Systemic issues in the healthcare setting account for most errors that result from patient misidentification, such as poor staff training, lack of proper communications, and flawed verification processes. These errors yield instant effects such as a long recovery time, serious health complications, or even death due to an administration of wrong medications (Rodziewicz & Hipskind 202 In addition, such errors of patient misidentification cause a lot of harm because they destroy the confidence that patients and families have in healthcare systems. Such errors pose an imminent danger to the safety of a patient and become long-standing vices of negligence or incompetence. This distrust may have long-term impacts as the patients and family members tend to put off or refuse medical care in the future for fear that they will repeat such errors. Distrust is not limited to individual cases and can create general public mistrust in the safety provided by competent medical care. This unwillingness leads to the deterioration of health outcomes, which, together with increasing healthcare costs caused by an already overburdened system, reinforces reliance on consistent patient identification as a fundamental practice to ensure proper confidence in provided services from medical institutions.
Some best practices that minimize identification errors include standard operating procedures (using two identifiers, including name and date of birth)and electronic health records. These measures include the application of barcode scanning and biometric technologies. Train staff in these protocols and educate people on the correct identification of patients. Different studies show that implementing stringent policies on the identification of patients contributes to reducing ID mistakes and ensuring better patient safety. Implementing standardized identification procedures, among which are multiple identifiers and technological approaches like barcode scanning, has an impact on reduced misidentification rates (Essink et al., 2020). Therefore, this diminishing number of errors provides immediate patient benefits and indirectly makes a healthcare environment generally safer. This results in decreased wrong-patient medication administration, surgical malpractices, and diagnostic errors associated with these interventions. Moreover, such mechanisms build a safety culture in all healthcare settings, highlighting thoroughness and accuracy at every interaction with the patient, leading to care enhancement.
The nursing personnel strive to maintain patient care coordination for improved safety. They often are the first interaction point with patients and serve a wide range of functions in patient care, meaning they play an essential role in the identification stage. Nursing professionals should enforce Best patient identification practices through disciplinary measures such as protocols to ensure compliance and push for advanced technologies (Somani, 2021). Nurses’ educating patients and their families about safety measures is vital in reducing risk factors in nursing practice. This intervention teaches patients and relatives to strengthen their willingness to participate in treatment, thereby increasing patient attention and making the environment safer through collaboration. Nurses foster an equal obligation to safety by being mindful of the processes of identification and correctness in care. This approach heightens vigilance among patients and their relatives, who are also looking to see if what they received is correct, adding a layer of protection against misidentification. These types of education also de-mystify clinical procedures, thereby reducing anxiety and creating a significant sense of trust for an effective health system. In going through such educational experiences, nurses have a vital role in facilitating engagement and safety within healthcare facilities by having patients as partners in keeping the healthcare error-free.
To properly manage the errors in patient identification, management should work with a vast amount of stakeholders, providers, administrative staff, and patients. Nurses should work with this group to promote and initiate reliable identification practices. The partnership between technology manufacturers and regulators is vital to ensure the dissemination of new identification methods for patients. These relationships enable the use of some advanced technologies, namely biometrics and RFID systems, in clinical practice that can be tailored to clinicians’ needs and legal regulations. Through partnership with technology practitioners, nurses will play a role in generating user-friendly systems with increased accuracy and efficiency. Concurrently, cooperation with regulatory bodies ensures that such technologies align with legal and ethical standards to create a safe environment. This active participation is essential to incorporating patient safety practices so that technological advances can be built on good standards of care and confidentiality. Therefore, the combination of people working in medicine, technology, and regulation leads to new cures that dramatically reduce misidentification errors, thus resulting in increased patient safety.
A considerable public safety hazard in health care is patient identification errors. They should strive to become the leaders of best practices and evidence-based solutions. When nurses can overcome these challenges, they can take the lead in improving care quality and safety. They are the first ones to be immediately in contact with patients and detect and manage risks associated with identification mistakes made by patients. As nurses are the custodians of invaluable information and clinical power, they can promote evidence-based practices that would have a bearing on policy and practice processes. Its prescriptive performance addresses the risk and creates a safety culture in medical facilities. This approach involves nurses from bedside care to policy advocacy and helps initiate systemic changes by placing patient safety first and providing high service provision in healthcare institutions.
Popescu, C., El-Chaarani, H., El-Abiad, Z., & Gigauri, I. (2022). Implementation of Health Information Systems to Improve Patient Identification. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(22), 15236. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/22/15236
Essink, H. M., Knops, A., Liqui Lung, A. M., van der Meulen, C. N., Wouters, N. L., van der Molen, A. J., … & Termaat, M. F. (2020). Real-time person identification in a hospital setting: A systematic review. Sensors, 20(14), 3937. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/14/3937
Somani, R., Muntaner, C., Hillan, E., Velonis, A. J., & Smith, P. (2021). A systematic review: effectiveness of interventions to de-escalate workplace violence against nurses in healthcare settings. Safety and health at work, 12(3), 289-295. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2093791121000354 Top of Form
Rodziewicz, T. L., & Hipskind, J. E. (2020). Medical error prevention. StatPearls. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing. http://www.saludinfantil.org/Postgrado_Pediatria/Pediatria_Integral/papers/Medical%20Error%20
Prevention%20-%20StatPearls%20-%20NCBI%20Bookshelf.pdf